On Not Intervening in Iran

I’m wandering off from the usual China-centered fare in this essay because I’ve been thinking a lot about the right thing to do with Iran. It’s not wholly unconnected to China, as you’ll see as you read it. I don’t pretend to be any kind of an expert on Iran; I trust any errors will be pointed out to me by keen reader, and I sincerely hope some of you will share your thoughts on what we should do in the comments, open to all readers fort his one.

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The question before us isn’t new, but the circumstances make it feel urgent in ways we haven’t experienced since the early 2000s. Iranian protesters, killed in a crackdown of staggering brutality, have pleaded for American help. President Trump drew and redrew red lines against mass killings, sent a carrier strike group toward the Persian Gulf, and threatened intervention. Yet as the death toll reportedly climbed into the thousands, no strikes came. Advocates for intervention frame this as a moral imperative — the chance to support a popular uprising without repeating the catastrophic nation-building mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan. Limited strikes, they argue, could tip the balance toward regime change while demonstrating that America still stands with those fighting for their basic rights.

My instinct is against military intervention in Iran. Not reflexively, not out of pacifism, and not because I’m indifferent to the suffering of Iranians risking everything for dignity and basic rights. I lean against it because I’ve thought carefully about what intervention would likely accomplish versus what it would cost, because history offers devastating lessons about what happens when we conflate military capability with political wisdom, and because the very assumptions underlying liberal interventionism deserve scrutiny — especially now, as American hegemony wanes and the consequences of our actions become harder to predict or control.

For the record: I’d reach this conclusion under any American president. My objections aren’t about Trump specifically — though I think his administration both increases the risks of mismanagement and makes the moral case for intervention impossible to sell. The hypocrisy would be staggering. Our allies wouldn’t buy it, and neither would most of the world. But the fundamental problems with intervention hold regardless of who occupies the White House. I know there are people for whom this question is straightforward — who’ve concluded on principle that American military intervention is categorically unjustified, or who are so committed to ending American hegemony that suffering under regimes like Iran’s becomes an acceptable cost. I’m not one of them. Something in me resists foreclosing intervention as a category — whether that’s residual American exceptionalism I haven’t fully examined or something else, I’m not certain. But that pull toward the possibility of using American power for good doesn’t change where I land on this case.

Before explaining my provisional opposition, I want to engage honestly with the strongest arguments for intervention — arguments that reflect genuine moral concern and strategic calculation, even if I ultimately find them unpersuasive.

The humanitarian case is real. Between late December and mid-January, Iranian security forces killed protesters — estimates range widely, from several thousand to over 30,000, though the true toll remains deeply uncertain. The regime cut internet access, deployed live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators, and began threatening mass executions under the charge of *moharebeh* (enmity against God), a capital offense. These aren’t abstractions. They’re people who share the same aspirations for dignity and human rights that we claim to value universally. When some of them explicitly call for foreign help, what does it say about us if we turn away?

The strategic case has weight too. Iran’s regional influence has been significantly degraded — its “axis of resistance” battered by Israeli strikes, its nuclear program set back by Operation Midnight Hammer last June, its economy in freefall with the rial having lost over 40% of its value. The regime faces compounding crises: economic, political, legitimacy, deterrence. Pro-intervention voices argue this is the moment of maximum leverage, when limited strikes could accelerate internal collapse without the need for occupation or nation-building. They point to the Soleimani assassination and last year’s nuclear strikes as evidence that targeted American force can weaken the regime without triggering the “rally around the flag” effect that intervention skeptics predict.

There’s also the question of American credibility. Trump drew a public red line — “help is on the way” to the protesters — and then assembled military assets in the region. If he backs down, does it signal that American threats are hollow? Does it abandon the principles of liberal internationalism at precisely the moment when they’re being tested?

These arguments deserve more than perfunctory acknowledgment. Not all of them come from cartoon warmongers; many are thoughtful analysts grappling with impossible trade-offs. I simply think they’re likely wrong about what intervention would accomplish and what it would unleash.

Start with the most basic claim: that strikes would help the protesters. The historical record suggests otherwise. When external powers bomb a country during internal upheaval, the regime’s narrative of foreign conspiracy often gains instant credibility. Iran’s leaders have spent decades depicting dissent as American and Israeli manipulation. Military strikes would risk vindicating that propaganda in the eyes of many Iranians who might otherwise sympathize with the protests but aren’t willing to be seen as tools of Washington and Tel Aviv.

The 1953 CIA-backed coup against Mohammad Mossadegh remains Iran’s original sin in relations with the United States, precisely because it validated suspicions that America prioritizes control over genuine Iranian rights. Every intervention since — from support for the Shah to sanctions to the Soleimani killing — gets interpreted through that lens. New strikes would more likely reinforce this history than overcome it.

Nor would strikes necessarily “punish” the regime’s decision-makers in ways that change their calculations. The people who ordered the crackdown — Ayatollah Khamenei, the IRGC leadership, the security apparatus — have demonstrated repeatedly that they’ll tolerate enormous costs to maintain power. They survived eight years of devastating war with Iraq, decades of sanctions, international isolation, and multiple rounds of domestic unrest. The notion that targeted strikes would instill fear and deter future repression may fundamentally misread the regime’s decision-making logic. Their actions suggest they may fear losing control over Iran’s political future more than they fear American bombs.

Intervention might give hardliners much of what they want: an external enemy to rally around, justification for emergency measures, and grounds to frame protesters as traitors rather than patriots. The protests would likely wane as people fear becoming collateral damage in an American campaign, and opposition figures would face impossible choices between supporting foreign intervention or being labeled regime defenders.

Here’s where a comparison might be useful. Imagine mass protests erupting across Chinese cities — driven by economic collapse, political repression, and demands for fundamental change. Imagine the government cracking down with lethal force, killing thousands, and cutting internet access. Imagine protesters asking America for help. Imagine Trump threatening military strikes. Would we support intervention then?

I strongly suspect most Americans would recoil from the idea. The risks would be immediately obvious: nuclear escalation, global economic catastrophe, superpower war. We’d recognize that bombing China would likely strengthen the Party’s grip, that the protesters themselves would be divided on whether foreign intervention helps, and that America doesn’t have the competence or legitimacy to reshape Chinese politics through force. Many Americans were troubled by reports from Xinjiang, yet no one seriously proposed military intervention.

So why is Iran different? The standard answer is that China is a peer competitor with nuclear weapons while Iran is a middle power with degraded defenses — which is my point. The Iran intervention debate isn’t really about principles of liberal internationalism or humanitarian responsibility. It seems to me to come down to perceived feasibility. We’re willing to contemplate intervention in Iran because we think we can get away with it, not because the moral case is fundamentally different from scenarios we’d reject elsewhere. If our commitment to supporting protesters is calibrated entirely by military vulnerability rather than by whether intervention would actually help, then we’re not operating from principle — we’re opportunistic. And that opportunism corrodes the very international norms and moral authority we claim to be defending.

There’s another dimension to this debate that most discussions avoid but that’s essential to understanding the strategic calculations at play: America’s waning global hegemony. For policymakers in the Trump administration and the broader strategic class, Iran represents a test case for whether American power can still shape outcomes in a region where our influence has been declining. There’s an unspoken fear that inaction would be another nail in the coffin of American primacy — that if America can’t or won’t intervene when protesters are being massacred in a middle power whose regional influence has already been degraded, what does that say about our ability to shape global events going forward?

I understand this anxiety, but acting from it seems like a mistake. The fundamental problem with the liberal interventionist project isn’t that we haven’t applied it rigorously enough; it’s that the assumptions underlying it were always questionable and have become less tenable as American power has become more contested. The belief that American force can reliably produce liberal or even favorable outcomes, that we understand other societies well enough to predict second- and third-order effects of our interventions, that military strikes can substitute for political legitimacy — these were never as solid as their proponents claimed, and they’ve been systematically undermined by two decades of failure in the broader Middle East.

Intervening in Iran to demonstrate that American primacy remains viable might accomplish the opposite. If the campaign strengthens hardliners, fragments the opposition, or sparks wider conflict, it would confirm rather than refute doubts about American power. The smarter approach is to recognize these limits and work within them, rather than risk another costly failure trying to prove we’re still the hegemon we once were.

This is also a pivotal moment for liberal interventionism as a doctrine. Whether the U.S. strikes or chooses restraint, the decision will shape how seriously the international community takes humanitarian intervention arguments for years to come. If strikes fail to achieve their aims — or worse, backfire spectacularly — it may mark the final discrediting of a foreign policy tradition already battered by Iraq and Afghanistan. If restraint prevails but is seen as abandonment, it could equally undermine future claims that American power serves moral purposes. Either way, Iran may prove to be the case that forces a long-overdue reckoning with what military force can and cannot accomplish in service of liberal ideals.

This doesn’t mean I advocate abandoning Iranian protesters or accepting a purely realist foreign policy that ignores human rights altogether. It means understanding that genuine support requires listening to what Iranians themselves want — and they appear to be divided on intervention — and that the most effective support often comes through non-military means: communications infrastructure, targeted sanctions on regime officials (not broad sanctions that punish civilians), asylum for dissidents, intelligence operations that expose corruption, diplomatic isolation of the regime while maintaining channels to civil society. I don’t know what toolkit is available to us, but surely something short of brute force is possible.

I mentioned earlier that I’m not a pacifist, and I want to be clear about what I mean. There are circumstances where military force might be justified — where it’s genuinely the least-bad option among terrible choices. But those circumstances are narrower than liberal interventionists often suggest.

I don’t have a rigid set of criteria that would apply universally. When we confront real decisions about intervention, we’re forced to reckon with a huge range of factors including intensely personal and emotional ones, at least in my case. The Rwandan genocide haunts some of us precisely because non-intervention allowed an atrocity that might have been stopped. The Iraq War haunts us because intervention based on nonexistent weapons created catastrophe in pursuit of goals that also turned out to be illusory.

What I can say is that the burden of proof for intervention should be extraordinarily high. It requires not just that something terrible is happening, but that military force would make it better rather than worse, that we understand the society in question well enough to predict the consequences, that we’re willing to commit the resources necessary to see it through, and that we’re not acting primarily from other motives (strategic advantage, hegemonic maintenance, domestic political concerns) while dressing them up in humanitarian language.

The Iran case seems to fail most of these tests. We don’t have strong evidence that strikes would help protesters rather than undermine them. Our track record in predicting Middle Eastern political dynamics is abysmal. The motives are transparently mixed — genuine concern about human rights intertwined with nuclear containment, regional competition, and questions about American credibility. And crucially, the Iranian protesters themselves are divided, with many activists inside Iran explicitly opposing foreign military intervention even as some diaspora voices call for it.

What ultimately tips me toward provisional opposition isn’t just the pragmatic case against intervention, though that’s compelling by itself. It’s the recognition that genuine support for people fighting for dignity and rights means respecting their agency rather than imposing our preferred solutions.

The patronizing assumption runs through much of the pro-intervention literature: that we in the West know better than Iranians themselves what they need, that our military power can accomplish what their political organizing cannot, that the region’s future is primarily a question for American decision-makers rather than for the people who actually live there. This reflects a presumption of centrality — the idea that every global crisis requires an American “response” — that I find both morally and practically unsupportable.

Iranian protesters deserve support. They deserve diplomatic backing, asylum when they need it, assistance to those who manage to get out, and as bright a spotlight as we can provide on the regime’s violence. What they probably don’t need is American bombs turning their uprising into a proxy conflict, strengthening the very hardliners they’re trying to remove, and validating decades of regime propaganda about foreign manipulation.

This isn’t comfortable moral territory. There’s something genuinely troubling about having the power to act and choosing restraint while people die. But the alternative — acting from a combination of moral urgency and hegemonic anxiety without clear understanding of the likely consequences — has produced enough catastrophe already. Sometimes the hardest wisdom is recognizing the limits of what outside powers can accomplish, however much we wish it were otherwise.

That’s where I land: with opposition to intervention, deep discomfort about the moral trade-offs involved, and recognition that this conclusion flows from my broader worldview about American power, Western assumptions about universal governance models, and respect for the agency of people fighting their own battles. It’s not knee-jerk anti-interventionism, and it’s not indifference to suffering. It’s a position arrived at through wrestling with history, power dynamics, and the question of what genuine support actually requires. I’m open to arguments that might shift my thinking, but this is where the evidence has brought me.